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How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

canny.io

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Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#11

Post by a13n »

bkruse wrote: post #3

Love Canny We use them at CommentSold for feature ideas, bug reports, and even top 1% feature ideas. The ability to tie it into our product and see the features voted on from an MRR aggregate not a vote-aggregate is phenomenal

Thanks for being a customer, Brandon! Definitely let us know how we can push the envelope even further here with regards to MRR/SaaS aggregation.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#12

Post by a13n »

_benj wrote: post #8

Congratulations! This is a really inspiring story and I really appreciate you guys opening the backdoor to show us how the magic happened!

Glad you enjoyed it! We're eager to write more transparent content like this, so let us know if there's anything specific that'd be interesting (eg. recruiting, finance, etc).

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#13

Post by seapunk »

Hi Andrew and Sarah! Congratulations for this milestone. I'm following your journey since your first blog post and it was a great motivation when we started building our startup as digital nomads too. I think many bootstrappers were inspired by Canny and your transparency along the years.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#14

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

a13n wrote: post #9
0x62 wrote: post #6

Down for me, cache link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a7QDlH...

Back up now! Upgraded our AWS Lightsail instance. Thanks for posting that cache link :)

> Upgraded our AWS Lightsail instance.

Use ElasticBeanStalk... nah, actually that's a terrible idea.

Edit: Use Caprover inside of an AMI on an autoscaling group on EC2 (t2.smalls if you want)... or use ECS on Fargate.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#15

Post by a13n »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #14
a13n wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back up now! Upgraded our AWS Lightsail instance. Thanks for posting that cache link :)

> Upgraded our AWS Lightsail instance. Use ElasticBeanStalk... nah, actually that's a terrible idea. Edit: Use Caprover inside of an AMI on an autoscaling group on EC2 (t2.smalls if you want)... or use ECS on Fargate.

Fair point, but honestly not a huge priority. Lightsail is a super convenient and cheap way to host our blog.

The main problem is we were on a $10/mo server, which is plenty for our typical blog traffic. But definitely not enough for HN! Heh.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#18

Post by ponker »

otoburb wrote: post #5
codegeek wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, 3.5 years to hit 1M ARR is pretty impressive if you are bootstrapped. Were they bootstrapped ?

Yes, they bootstrapped their way entirely to $1M ARR. Huge accomplishment. HN hug of death on the original link so it's hard to read that right now.

Uh, how do you “bootstrap” a team of 9 at $1m ARR? I thought bootstrapping means your revenues cover your costs.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#19

Post by ponker »

bkruse wrote: post #3

Love Canny We use them at CommentSold for feature ideas, bug reports, and even top 1% feature ideas. The ability to tie it into our product and see the features voted on from an MRR aggregate not a vote-aggregate is phenomenal

What is “comment selling”?

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#20

Post by ptudan »

ponker wrote: post #18
otoburb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they bootstrapped their way entirely to $1M ARR. Huge accomplishment. HN hug of death on the original link so it's hard to read that right now.

Uh, how do you “bootstrap” a team of 9 at $1m ARR? I thought bootstrapping means your revenues cover your costs.

IIRC bootstrapping just means that you don't take VC funding, instead rely on yourself, family and friends. You certainly aren't always breaking even.
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